HEXES the sunday spectra 1/8/12

There’s a story (or at least an anecdote) behind this photograph, but there’s nothing to be found other than “Production Still — METROPOLIS — 1927.” Was it the wrap party? Was it five in the morning? Was everyone drunk? Why am I not surprised that Fritz would take the drums, or that Ms Helm would blow her lungs through the coolest instrument of the still-new century?

While he may not have been the sadist many of his actor made him out to be, Lang was such a hard driving perfectionist that Ms. Helm who worked virtually every day for its 18 months, often hanging upside down or standing in water up to her waist for hours at a time, found the experience excruciating.

After one torturous ordeal, when she wondered why a double could not have taken her place during the nine days took to shoot a scene in which she is encased in a metallic robot shell, her face obscured, Lang haughtily claimed an author’s creative sensibility.

“I have to feel that you are inside the robot,” he said. “I was able to see you even when I didn’t.”

After the movie made her a star, Ms. Helm, who had her own artistic standards, refused to make another movie with Lang. She made a successful transformation to sound, but refused to abandon Germany for Hollywood. Then in 1935, disgusted with the Nazi takeover of the film industry, she abruptly quit, marrying a industrialist, Hugo von Kunheim, himself a Nazi opponent.

The couple left German for Italy in 1942, but although they returned after the war, Ms Helm had put her career so far behind her she made no further films and turned down almost all requests for interviews. Ms. Helm’s survivors include a son, Mathias Kunheim of London, two other sons and a daughter.

His take on the Zola Jesus track, “In Your Nature” from the album “Conatus,” is a radical re-shaping of the song, keeping the vocals from the original and adding in new guitar and drum parts. Though Nika Roza Danilova, of Zola Jesus, ordinarily opts not to remix, she made an exception in this case.

“I feel like reinterpreting something can remove its context,” she told Pitchfork. “But when David Lynch asks to remix your song, you let him.”

Though Lynch is best known for his filmmaking (his most recent was the hallucinogenic epic “Inland Empire” in 2006), recently, he’s turned serious about his music. This year, he released a new album,Crazy Clown Time.

For his remix of “In Your Nature,” we hear some of those darkly-lit, lurking horrors we’ve seen in his films. What results is a slightly dreamy, deliberately paced lament that feels as if it should play over a moody driving scene on screen.

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Hitch’s Last Piece for Vanity Fair: “Dickens’s Inner Child”

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By Christopher Hitchens | Illustration by André Carrilho

While it’s tempting to see Charles Dickens as a fusion of his heroes and villains, on the great British novelist’s 200th birthday his true gifts should be recognized: a respect for childhood and a willingness to atone for his mistakes.

An extremely rare documentary about Witchcraft aired once in the UK in 1971. Featuring contributions from Eleanor Bone, Cecil Williamson, Alex & Maxine Sanders [above], Doreen Valiente et al. Very much of its time and with some very rare footage, also includes reference to the famously unsolved murder of Charles Walton on Meon Hill.